Be careful with your Sun disk RMAs!

We got a good reminder today that failed hard drives don’t go to the big drive graveyard in the sky when they are sent back on RMA. We got a replacement disk for a failed v20z drive in a cluster node and to our surprise when we popped it in instead of the box going into a PXE boot it started up RHEL AS 3 off the drive! Oh my! We took a quick look around and it’s obvious the disk came out of another v20z at Toshiba in Japan. There’s stuff on the drive. Logs. Code. Stuff I sure as hell wouldn’t want leaving my shop. We zero’ed the drive and image’ed it after our cursory glance.

Scary stuff.

So remember: Your dead disks are refurbished and sent back into the field. Obviously neither Sun or Seagate are erasing the platters. So don’t leave data on them! I’d love to hear how people ensure that any data left on the platters of an unresponsive drive are purged of data. How big of a magnet do you need to be sure the bits are sufficiently scrambled?

(Note: Someone will probably point out that this isn’t Sun’s fault, it’s Seagate’s. That’s true to a certain extent, but I will point out that I’ve *never* gotten a Seagate disk from NetApp that wasn’t zeroed.)

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Be careful with your Sun disk RMAs!,” an entry on VMUNIX Blues

Published:: 12.02.05 / 6pm

Category:: general, solaris, storage

About

VMUNIX Blues is written by me, Mark Mayo, in Vancouver, BC. I like unix, coding, and the web, and naturally most articles I write here have something to do with what I like. If commenting on an article isn’t your style, you can always email me — mark (at) vmunix.com.

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Saint Aardvark 12.05.05 / 11am

DBAN is one way. Another, and one that I’m increasingly leaning toward, is simply to take the damn thing apart and crack the platters with pliars. Admittedly, I’m using cheapo P/SATA disks rather than SCSI, but it’s pretty effective…

Doug 12.05.05 / 1pm

Dban is what I use to wipe drives. At work we don’t have support on anything, so the drive is taken out, put in a storage locker 3 floors under ground and left there to rot. if/when they are found the data is either useless or the drive is just totally unusable.

But Dban is the way to go if you want to defeat all but the three letter government agencies. Most non-gov agencies don’t have the money, gear or time to recover from the highest levels of dban erasure. I don’t sell/ebay anything that has a drive in it until it has run Dban, at least once.
Cheers

mark 12.05.05 / 11pm

If the drive is working then DBAN looks like the right tool. Thx for the link guys!

I’ll have to check the fine print of my service contract to see if I’m allowed to physically destroy the platters before sending the dead disk back!

Doug 12.06.05 / 6am

I have heard the key to using magnets to destroy data is to cycle the field (reverse poles, modulate the power, move the field around). if you just put a massive magnet on a drive it will toast the drive for sure, but it will do it in a predictible fashion where it may be possible to reassemble it (with external hardware/physical scanning of the platter). The best way I have heard to totally distroy your data is to grind off off the surface of the platter and never RMA a failed drive (what is your data truly worth?). even if you bust up the platter, you have to have pieces less than 1mm or a rescan is possible (beware the three letter gov agencies)
Cheers

JBrickely 01.21.06 / 7pm

Forget wiping the drive, better to take it out back, did a hole fill with clay and place the drive at the bottom of the hole. Next take a mixture of Iron Oxide and Aluminum shavings 1:3 ratio and pour into a clay flower pot. Place the pot full of your homemade THERMITE above the drives and ignite with a common 4th of July sparkler. Not forgetting to get your butt as far away as you can 200 yards should be safe. The heat will be directed through the flower pots hole in the base at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and will literally liquify the hard disk(s)! THERMITE is incredible stuff and nothing will put out the fire until it burns itself out! You can literally burn straight through an automobile engine block in seconds!

No more data baby! Of course, don’t even think about doing this if you are in say Oklahoma this time of year (brush fire country, etc) no need to burn down the county.